The Qwen development team announced on September 20 that its latest image generation model would be available to the public. Qwen Image 2.1 becomes open source 10 hours after the initial social media post at 03:11 UTC to provide public access to the model's architecture.

The release provides a new version of the image model series for the developer community. The announcement was issued by the QwenDevs account to notify users of the specific release window and the immediate availability of the 2.1 iteration.